Disaster Recovery Backup

Disaster recovery masures are put into practice whenever a disaster occurs, disasters usually mean total failure and they can be caused by a natural cause, such as earthquakes, floods, wild fires, hurricanes, etc. or caused by the man, such as war, accidents, sabotage, burglary and such.

Whenever a disaster takes place, full data loss is expected, therefore an efficient backup solution must be available. Creating a backup for disaster recovery is a preventive measure, since there’s no way to know when a disaster will hit. Disaster recovery backups should always contain full data and be constantly updated, either full mirror backups or incremental and decremental backups, and should be on an offsite location to make sure that they are available after the disaster hits.

Some time ago, tape backups were used for disaster recovery backups, however since the size of data keeps growing exponentially and storage capacity in hard drives keeps increasing in size and decreasing in price, we find that tapes are no longer an available method, as they take too long to backup and restore and their capacity is fairly limited.

Since sending data through physical media can take a while (delivery times, pick up times), it’s a good idea to have an offsite backup that can be recovered online somehow. If it’s a large backup, it’s a good idea to start retrieving such backup online to start the restore procedure while the rest of the backup is delivered through physical media.

However it’s important to note that not all online backup services are suitable for disaster recovery, since some of them will limit the amount of data that can be transferred or will have limited bandwidth, which could slow down the restore process. If you want to know if an online backup services provider is good enough to be trusted for disaster recovery backups, you should try to transfer huge amounts of data in and out within a 24 hour period. Try to transfer at least twice your current backup size in and out, if the test succeeds then you can have some peace of mind as you can expect them to work even if only 50% of their capacity is available at the time of the recovery.

Another good idea is to always have a “base backup” on DVD or other physical media available locally, even though it might not be updated, it can save you some time and get some essential services up and running while you perform a full restore.

All in all, all companies should have some disaster recovery measures in place, preventive ones and a detailed list of steps to take whenever disasters hit so that the impact time can be decreased to as little as possible.